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Google Translate does not seem to differentiate between these, giving only an option for "Norwegian", so I have been a bit perplexed about what to put there. Th

Google Translate does not seem to differentiate between these, giving only an option for "Norwegian", so I have been a bit perplexed about what to put there. Thanks for this explanatory article.

larsiusprime 3y ago
Most Norwegian you will encounter in such contexts is almost certainly Bokmål; a rule of thumb is that you are pretty unlikely to encounter Nynorsk unless you are actually in Norway itself, or consuming a lot of Norwegian media.
- rvense 3y ago
  If you thought you understood Norwegian but then suddenly don't, it's Nynorsk.
vidarh 3y ago
You can with some luck ask ChatGPT to translate between them, and also even between Norwegian spoken dialects. It's not perfect, but when I tested it a while back it even did reasonably well at emulating/translating to sociolects like the left wing/radical 1970s urban one mentioned in the article. But the difference in common use has steadily diminished. When I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s many of the most conservative forms of Bokmål were already falling out of favour, and my teachers were constantly pushing for us to use the forms matching our dialects, which for most people (I grew up near Oslo) meant a greater overlap with Nynorsk even then. So while "Samnorsk" isn't being talked about much any more, in practice the gap is steadily diminishing. What I think is quite remarkable is that this gradual merging has seen Bokmål, partially due to politics, change at least as much as Nynorsk. (For two languages so close together, language has been extremely political in Norway, though "peak language politics" was probably reached in the 1970s.) Many "Danishisms" like "reverse numerals" ("fem og tredve" - "five and thirty" - instead of "trettifem" - "thirty five") that were widespread still in my childhood are now firmly old-fashioned, for example.
- Tor3 3y ago
  Nitpicking I know - but "reverse numerals" weren't a Danishism at all. That's all from Old Norse. Also remember that the vast majority of spoken Norwegian wasn't affected by Danish at all, and that included the "reverse numerals" which have survived all over Norway. As was mentioned in another comment, the switch to non-reversal numbers was something introduced in order to support phone operators, who could then just enter the digits as they are spoken and not wait for the next word. In any case, as it's an original feature of Norwegian (Danish has its own variety of course.. with its own quirks) it's still fairly alive and well among a large patch of Norwegians.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Thanks for the correction. To be honest that didn't occur to me - as I was growing up it was very much lumped in with "other old fashioned stuff" that was dismissed as conservative bokmål and I've missed the Norse connection. I know it's still seeing some use, but the steady reduction in use was very noticeable already during my school years in the 80's and 90's, and appears to have continued. Some use will still certainly persist for a long time. The fun thing is we can easily quantify the relative rise and decline in written use at least by searching the national library (nb.no) for newspapers. I've only done the search for one set of numbers, so a major caveat that maybe there's large variance between different numbers, but a search for "fem og tredve" combined with "femogtredve" * 2000-2024: 412 newspaper hits * 1950-1999: 3112 (caution, different bucket sizes) * 1900-1949: 4303 (before the reform) (the "halfway point" og "fem og tretti" is also in use; 42 between 2000-2024, but never very widespread) vs. "trettifem": * 2000-2024: 2587 * 1950-1999: 5728 * 1900-1949: 69 (before the reform) (You can break down the search results in finer chunks too, but I think this gives enough of an indication)
    - Tor3 3y ago
      In writing, I totally agree - even though I will speak the reversed form often, I don't use that in writing. If I for some reason aren't writing the actual numbers (22) I will write "tjueto", not "to-og-tjue" even if that's what I would say. It's extremely rare to see reverse notation in writing.
avgcorrection 3y ago
Gmail will helpfully underline a third of my words as being wrong.
perlgeek 3y ago
My impression was that Google neglected Norway a bit, my wife (who is half-Norwegian) told me that Google results for Norwegian websites were pretty terrible just a few years ago. Also, Nynorsk really is a minority (spoken by only about half a million people), which makes it harder to create a corpus for automatic translation.
- NorwegianDude 3y ago
  People don't speak nynorsk or bokmål. It's s written language. Some dialects are closer to one written form than the other.
  - Sesse__ 3y ago
    There is a tiny minority of people who insist on speaking nynorsk exactly as it is written, usually in an archaic style like the 1917 normal. Ironically, these people tend to live in Oslo or surrounding areas, where the dialect is far and wide away from nynorsk. It is e.g. pretty much the only group of people that use the “Noreg” form in actual speech. (Bokmål, and nearly all Norwegian dialects, use “Norge” for the country of Norway, but written nynorsk generally prefers “Noreg”.) Also, in television and radio, you may hear people trying to speak nynorsk pretty much as it is written, especially if their personal dialect is much closer to bokmål. (So-called “NRK-nynorsk” :-) )
    - Tor3 3y ago
      As for the "exactly as written".. I had a teacher like that, in middle school. He was from the north but did not speak his real dialect, instead he transformed his natural speech into as close to spoken "nynorsk" as he could. He was my teacher in the "Norwegian" class, and the only thing we did in that class was to write in Nynorsk. That was all. We had two sets of notebooks each, we had to write essays in Nynorsk twice a week (thus two notebooks so that we could alternate). Until then I had never had any particular animosity against Nynorsk, but I truly learned to hate it through and through. From him. Only now, untold decades later, have I learned to love it. Reading a book by Jon Fosse (the recent Noble prize winner) right now. In fact what I really like is reading the very old, original form as Aasen created it and Vinje wrote it.
olavgg 3y ago
Even Google search is pretty bad, as they don't have synonyms for the norwegian language when doing search. For example Høyskole -> Høgskule, Barneskole -> Barneskule (high school, elementary school) These exact same words results in completely different search results. It so annoying when you trying to find something, you have to search multiple times. This is also relevant for many other languages. I absolutely belive you if spend some time implementing a smart synonyms-mapper, you could absolutely take web search 5 steps forward.

Google Translate does not seem to differentiate between these, giving only an option for "Norwegian", so I have been a bit perplexed about what to put there. Thanks for this explanatory article.

larsiusprime 3y ago

Most Norwegian you will encounter in such contexts is almost certainly Bokmål; a rule of thumb is that you are pretty unlikely to encounter Nynorsk unless you are actually in Norway itself, or consuming a lot of Norwegian media.

rvense 3y ago
If you thought you understood Norwegian but then suddenly don't, it's Nynorsk.

vidarh 3y ago

You can with some luck ask ChatGPT to translate between them, and also even between Norwegian spoken dialects. It's not perfect, but when I tested it a while back it even did reasonably well at emulating/translating to sociolects like the left wing/radical 1970s urban one mentioned in the article. But the difference in common use has steadily diminished. When I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s many of the most conservative forms of Bokmål were already falling out of favour, and my teachers were constantly pushing for us to use the forms matching our dialects, which for most people (I grew up near Oslo) meant a greater overlap with Nynorsk even then. So while "Samnorsk" isn't being talked about much any more, in practice the gap is steadily diminishing. What I think is quite remarkable is that this gradual merging has seen Bokmål, partially due to politics, change at least as much as Nynorsk. (For two languages so close together, language has been extremely political in Norway, though "peak language politics" was probably reached in the 1970s.) Many "Danishisms" like "reverse numerals" ("fem og tredve" - "five and thirty" - instead of "trettifem" - "thirty five") that were widespread still in my childhood are now firmly old-fashioned, for example.

Tor3 3y ago
Nitpicking I know - but "reverse numerals" weren't a Danishism at all. That's all from Old Norse. Also remember that the vast majority of spoken Norwegian wasn't affected by Danish at all, and that included the "reverse numerals" which have survived all over Norway. As was mentioned in another comment, the switch to non-reversal numbers was something introduced in order to support phone operators, who could then just enter the digits as they are spoken and not wait for the next word. In any case, as it's an original feature of Norwegian (Danish has its own variety of course.. with its own quirks) it's still fairly alive and well among a large patch of Norwegians.
- vidarh 3y ago
  Thanks for the correction. To be honest that didn't occur to me - as I was growing up it was very much lumped in with "other old fashioned stuff" that was dismissed as conservative bokmål and I've missed the Norse connection. I know it's still seeing some use, but the steady reduction in use was very noticeable already during my school years in the 80's and 90's, and appears to have continued. Some use will still certainly persist for a long time. The fun thing is we can easily quantify the relative rise and decline in written use at least by searching the national library (nb.no) for newspapers. I've only done the search for one set of numbers, so a major caveat that maybe there's large variance between different numbers, but a search for "fem og tredve" combined with "femogtredve" * 2000-2024: 412 newspaper hits * 1950-1999: 3112 (caution, different bucket sizes) * 1900-1949: 4303 (before the reform) (the "halfway point" og "fem og tretti" is also in use; 42 between 2000-2024, but never very widespread) vs. "trettifem": * 2000-2024: 2587 * 1950-1999: 5728 * 1900-1949: 69 (before the reform) (You can break down the search results in finer chunks too, but I think this gives enough of an indication)
  - Tor3 3y ago
    In writing, I totally agree - even though I will speak the reversed form often, I don't use that in writing. If I for some reason aren't writing the actual numbers (22) I will write "tjueto", not "to-og-tjue" even if that's what I would say. It's extremely rare to see reverse notation in writing.

avgcorrection 3y ago

Gmail will helpfully underline a third of my words as being wrong.

perlgeek 3y ago

My impression was that Google neglected Norway a bit, my wife (who is half-Norwegian) told me that Google results for Norwegian websites were pretty terrible just a few years ago. Also, Nynorsk really is a minority (spoken by only about half a million people), which makes it harder to create a corpus for automatic translation.

NorwegianDude 3y ago
People don't speak nynorsk or bokmål. It's s written language. Some dialects are closer to one written form than the other.
- Sesse__ 3y ago
  There is a tiny minority of people who insist on speaking nynorsk exactly as it is written, usually in an archaic style like the 1917 normal. Ironically, these people tend to live in Oslo or surrounding areas, where the dialect is far and wide away from nynorsk. It is e.g. pretty much the only group of people that use the “Noreg” form in actual speech. (Bokmål, and nearly all Norwegian dialects, use “Norge” for the country of Norway, but written nynorsk generally prefers “Noreg”.) Also, in television and radio, you may hear people trying to speak nynorsk pretty much as it is written, especially if their personal dialect is much closer to bokmål. (So-called “NRK-nynorsk” :-) )
  - Tor3 3y ago
    As for the "exactly as written".. I had a teacher like that, in middle school. He was from the north but did not speak his real dialect, instead he transformed his natural speech into as close to spoken "nynorsk" as he could. He was my teacher in the "Norwegian" class, and the only thing we did in that class was to write in Nynorsk. That was all. We had two sets of notebooks each, we had to write essays in Nynorsk twice a week (thus two notebooks so that we could alternate). Until then I had never had any particular animosity against Nynorsk, but I truly learned to hate it through and through. From him. Only now, untold decades later, have I learned to love it. Reading a book by Jon Fosse (the recent Noble prize winner) right now. In fact what I really like is reading the very old, original form as Aasen created it and Vinje wrote it.

olavgg 3y ago

Even Google search is pretty bad, as they don't have synonyms for the norwegian language when doing search. For example Høyskole -> Høgskule, Barneskole -> Barneskule (high school, elementary school) These exact same words results in completely different search results. It so annoying when you trying to find something, you have to search multiple times. This is also relevant for many other languages. I absolutely belive you if spend some time implementing a smart synonyms-mapper, you could absolutely take web search 5 steps forward.